Issue : Please oppose S. 54, the gun licensure bill

I sent some more letters out to the Florida Representatives that was brought to my attention by Gun Owners of America. Go to their site for an automated form to some of your representatives, I have to send a couple other routes.

Date: 02/28/2013 Time: 9:45 PM

Issue : Please oppose S. 54, the gun licensure bill

------------------------------------------------------------------- Please oppose S. 54, the gun licensure bill which anti-gunners are trying to dub the "gun trafficking bill." This bill is horrible for the following reasons.

1. The bill would impose a 20-year prison term if a person planned ("conspired") to purchase a firearm in order to give or raffle it to a person who, unbeknownst to him, is a "prohibited person."

Who is a prohibited person?

Well, there are the 150,000 law-abiding veterans who are "prohibited persons" -- for no other reason than that a psychiatrist appointed a fiduciary to oversee their financial affairs.

But probably the biggest category of "prohibited persons" is persons who smoke marijuana. Under 18 U.S.C. 922(d)(3) and (g)(3), one cannot possess a firearm in America if one is "an unlawful user of ... any controlled substance ..."

In over a dozen states, marijuana has been wholly or partly legalized under STATE law.

It doesn't matter ... if one even thinks about selling or raffling a gun to this expanding class of persons, one can go to prison for 20 years under S. 54.

2. The bill would make one a federal "prohibited person" if he is prohibited from owning a gun under "State or local law."

What does that even mean?

In places like New York and Chicago, everyone is prohibited from owning a firearm without a license. Does that mean that everyone in these jurisdictions is a federal "prohibited person" under S. 54?

What if someone applies for a license and is found not to have a need to possess one? Under the slip-shod language of the Leahy bill, these individuals would probably become federal "prohibited persons" because the bill denies any person from owning a firearm if they are "prohibited by STATE OR LOCAL LAW from possessing, receiving, selling, shipping, transporting, transferring, or otherwise disposing of the firearm or ammunition." (S. 54, Section 5.)

Oh, incidentally, under the Veterans Disarmament Act, states are required to send the names of 95% of their prohibited persons to the FBI's NICS system - or lose federal funding.

So now you will have millions of law-abiding citizens - living in places like New York City and Chicago - who have their names placed in the NICS system. And the Leahy bill doesn't address some very important questions related to their status as gun owners.

How will these banned citizens get their names cleared? The federal government has for years continued enforcing the Schumer amendment which defunds the ability of the ATF to restore the rights of non-violent prohibited persons. Will New Yorkers and Chicagoans get their gun rights restored after they move away from the localities that banned them from owning guns and which turned them into prohibited persons?

Again, the bill doesn't say. But we could expect that a few years from now, a future anti-gun President could use the language in S. 54 to impose a federal licensure requirement on these persons - as part of a new 23-point Executive Action memo - and make non-licensees federal prohibited persons (with all that that implies).

Maybe - just maybe - the courts would save us from the implications of Leahy's goofball language.

But answer us this: Why do anti-gun senators and representatives continue to push language which they know is fatally flawed - just so they can say they "broke the back of the gun lobby"?

The solution is clear: Senators - if they are pro-gun - MUST vote against a "motion to proceed" to any of this goofball legislation.